Tag Archives: sci-fi

Most Underrated/Overrated SF

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We’ve done music and film in these posts before; thought I’d see if anyone read books.

So in terms of the most overrated sci-fi author, I’d go with Isaac Asimov. He’s hugely famous, but his books are really mediocre nothings (at least as I remember them; it’s been a while.) Gimmicky, outlandish plot, paper-thin characters, serviceable prose; just not a whole lot there. Heinlein is at least genuinely weird; the only thing to say for Asimov’s books really is that they thump along and are for the most part inoffensive.

For underrated — hardly anyone knows about John Christopher or Gwyneth Jones, both of whom I think are fantastic writers. (I’ve written quite a bit about both at the links.) (Oh…and one more piece about John Christopher here.
 

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Let the Future Be Whitewashed…Today!

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Everybody knows that racism is bad, but somehow hating diversity is cool. Thus, Felicity Savage over on the Amazing Stories site has a post where she chastises non-white people for wanting to see themselves in science fiction stories. She concludes by praising the work of Stephen Baxter, which she says provides the following insights.

Speculative fiction this good achieves something no other genre can do: it makes you realize, really realize, that we’re all in this together. Black, white, yellow, brown, male, female … to the Big Bad lurking on the dark side of the moon, we all look like snacks. That kind of perspective shift is what I read the genre for.

This is simultaneously honest and oblivious — the first predicated on the second. Because, of course, the reason that it is important to include diverse characters and diverse voices in speculative fiction would be because the assertion “we’re all in this together” is not, in fact, a pure, shining, unimpeachable truth, handed down by the gods of speculative fiction for our enlightenment. The statement “we’re all in this together” is, instead, an ideological presumption which is not supported by most of the extant facts. Kids in segregated schools on the south side of Chicago aren’t in this together with folks on the north side who have buttloads of tax money dumped into their science labs. Folks who were enslaved weren’t in it together with the people who pretended to own them with the collusion of the law. Women who lost their property rights during marriage weren’t in it together with the men who controlled them. And so forth. Proclaiming that justice and equality have been achieved because you’ve imagined some big old space monster is not profound. It. is. bullshit.

To say that human difference is not part of good sci-fi is to erase the thematic concerns of many of sci-fi’s greatest writers, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula Le Guin to Octavia Butler to Samuel Delany to Joanna Russ and on and on. It is, moreover, to admit to an almost ludicrous poverty of imagination. Sci-fi is dedicated to telling stories that haven’t been; to exploring the entire range of what might be. And yet, the only story you can think of, the only future you can see, is one in which white people’s experiences are the sole benchmark of importance, in which all people’s troubles and traumas are subsumed in white people’s traumas; in which, somehow, racial (and gender?) difference has ceased to matter,and in which that “ceasing to matter” means, not a blending of diverse races and experiences, but an erasure of all races and experiences which aren’t the dominant one right now, at this particular time.

“Nothing is gained by mapping our fragmented ethnic and sexual identities onto our fiction with the fidelity of a cellphone camera photo,” Savage says. To which one can only ask, who is it that gains nothing exactly? Ethnic and sexual identities are a big part of how we live; exploring them has been a huge resource for science fiction in the past. Admittedly, if you’re committed to a world in which you never have to think about others, and in which the one sci-fi story is a story about how your particular concerns, no matter how boring and blinkered, should erase everyone else in a lovely rush of imperialist amity, then, yes, diversity is an irritating distraction. If, on the other hand, you think that sci-fi should be as rich and complicated as the world we live in, then including difference is not a failure, but a necessity.

HT: N.K. Jemisin.
 

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Virility Agonistes

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Donald Barthelme calls Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 Return From the Stars “stunning,” according to the little front cover blurb on the edition I’ve got. That seems about right, though not quite in the way that Barthelme meant it.

The book’s about Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from distant stars having aged only 10 years while more than 100 years have passed on earth (thanks relativity!) The world has changed a lot, and he’s having trouble adjusting. As he says on the first page:

The bright colors of the women’s clothes I had by now learned to accept, but the men I still suspected, irrationally, of affectation….

That’s pretty much the whole novel there. The problem with the future is that it is terribly, frighteningly effeminate. The world has developed a process, betrization, which is performed on infants and effectively surgically castrates them — they cease being able to even formulate aggressive thoughts. It also apparently reduces their size (the feminine clothing is maybe an unrelated development.) Thus, Hal is cast into a decadent world where he’s the lone virile uber-masculine giant in a world of meek and tiny girly men — and meek and tiny girly women. And if anyone doubts that this is a total adolescent power fantasy, Hal’s uber-masculinity quickly seduces the world’s most beautiful movie star, who he discards in favor of another woman, Eri, who he kind of sort of rapes, but it’s all right because it turns out she likes it.

Lem’s a much-praised author, and this is one of his most-praised books, so you’re probably thinking there must be more to it than that. But nope; that’s all that’s on offer. Hal agonizes at this soft world without risk, performs manly exercise routines and drives dangerously to work off his stress, and wows the womanfolk, or stalks them — Lem doesn’t seem able to tell the difference. Risk and exploration are incessantly, obsessively figured as male (there were no women on Hal’s expedition, of course); home and hearth are just as obsessively figured as feminine, so that Hal’s decision to not go back into space is linked inevitably to his marriage to Eri, a character about whom we know nothing except that she finds the violent, whiny Hal unaccountably attractive (the book delicately suggests that this is because he’s such a good lay; betrization may prevent good sex too, maybe.)

Again, as Barthelme indicates, there is something “stunning” about the blatant idiocy of the gender politics. Sci-fi is almost as notorious as superhero comics for its bone-headed wish fulfillment, but even by the standards of Flash-Gordon-space-opera nonsense, Return from the Stars is eager to shove its virility under your nose. The main difference, and what makes this arty, I guess, is that most space opera revels in its protagonist’s power, whereas Lem coats his power-worship in philosophical hand-wringing (is a non-violent world worth abandoning the human spirit of adventure?!) and hypocritical self-pity (oh nos! I’m bigger and stronger than everyone on earth, and must fuck all the women! What ever will I do?) This is, in short, a dreadful, dishonest, sexist piece of crap, which manages to combine the worst aspects of male mid-life-crisis literary fiction with the worst aspects of stunted male adventure garbage. I’ve read some Lem books before that I’ve enjoyed, but this sure makes me not want to ever read another.

Black Leather Corset of Dune

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This first appeared quite a while ago in the Chicago Reader.
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Porn is the genre fiction that dare not speak its name. When you think of genre, you tend to think of sci-fi, detective, horror, western, romance, or the like. Porn doesn’t make the list — instead, its set off in a box by itself, for special censure or (less often) praise. Yet, when you look closely, porn doesn’t really seem all that anomalous. Like other genre art, it’s broadly popular, has its own predictable tropes, and appeals primarily (though not exclusively) to one gender. Porn isn’t an absolute evil ruining our children, nor is it a liberating force releasing the power of our repressed sexuality. It’s just another marketing niche.

This isn’t meant as a sneer. On the contrary, once you stop thinking about porn as moral outrage or anthropological curiosity and start thinking of it as just another pulp genre, it’s a lot easier to see its virtues and, for that matter, to put its vices in context. Like other great genre narratives — Agatha Christie’s novels, say, or John Carpenter’s movies — good porn fulfills the most obvious expectations in surprising ways while veering vertiginously between extreme technical competence and grungy amateurism. Most of all, porn, like pulp, is studiously uninterested in good taste, which means that the best examples have an energy and an imagination hard to duplicate in more sedate forms.

There’s certainly nothing sedate about Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning’s Tranceptor comic book series. The titular (in various ways) Tranceptors are a kind of female dominatrix priesthood who ride through a post-apocalyptic landscape in carriages pulled by buxom leather-clad fetish horse-girls and/or well-hung leather-clad fetish horse boys. Our heroine (called simply Tranceptor) has inventively intimate encounters with her horse-girls (chains, water, lather, various attachments), with another Tranceptor named Ravanna, and with Hyu, the cute station sub-groom who looks decidedly underage. Most spectacularly, the Tranceptor is raped by Ravanna’s pal, a disgusting mutant-lizard thing named Sslthsss. (There is no apparent lasting physical or psychological damage — the Tranceptors are a tough bunch.)

This is all trashy, stylish good fun. Conlon’s a tattoo artist, and he and Manning have that testosterone swagger down cold — the first Tranceptor volume, for example, opens with a tour de force of faux noir, sensual solid black shadows and stark whites washing over piles of fetish gear and a voluptuously writhing sleeping female form, complete with obligatory ass shots and nipple eruptions. The cynically exploitative surface flash is certainly part of the charm — but it isn’t the only thing going on, either.

Like all pulp, porn tends to cross-pollinate with other genres. The sci-fi/sex fertilization has been particularly intense. *Heavy Metal* is an obvious touchstone, but a big part of the avant-garde sf movement from the seventies on has involved explicit erotica. Writers like Samuel R. Delaney and John Varley lovingly fetishize gender transformation and interspecies intercourse — and include a fair bit of explicit sex. One paradigmatic example, Piers Anthony’s semi-masterpiece “The Barn,” features an alternate universe where some human beings are deliberately brain-damaged and then placed in barns where they are bred and milked like cattle. Our dimension-hopping protagonist gets to offer his services as stud as the story boldly explores the realm where “controversial and brave” slides right into “surreptitious stroke material.”

What’s especially enjoyable about Tranceptor is that, while it is in many ways heir to this tradition, it is much more comfortable with its pulp status than its highbrow predecessors. Delaney uses his forays into porn in a contradictory (but hardly unique) effort to cement his bona fides as a highbrow artist. Piers Anthony is a bit more confused — but it is certainly clear that he is conflicted about his status as pornographer. That’s not all to the bad — the intense anxiety of “The Barn” is part of what gives it its squicky charge. But there is also something to be said for being on top of your shit. Conlon and Manning’s perversion isn’t so much fraught as it is enthusiastically delectable. Probably the best image in the comic is a panel of Sslthsss, arms and legs wrapped around a structural beam, head resting on his hands, as he watches his mistress below him suck off one of her horse boys. The lizard-thing looks like a happy cat, thoroughly entertained. And to complete the picture, he’s got one of the station men named Raika tied up and dangling from his tail, and his outsized member is dripping cum on the poor guy’s head.

In high-brow sf — or for that matter, in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s historical/porn/literary hybrid comic *Lost Girls* — this sort of perversity tends to serve as a labored allegory of freedom, mutability, or desire. It’s the pulpy goodness about which the highbrow wax nostalgically literary — as when Moore, for example, laboriously leads his characters into a roomful of costumes in order to drive home the joys of role-playing. In *Tranceptor*, on the other hand, the perversion is weighted, not by exegesis, but by pulp tropes. For example the Tranceptors are treated like typical mysterious sci-fi matriarch — say one of the Bene Gesserit from *Dune*. In this context, when the seated Ravanna reaches into Raika’s pants and casually pulls out his penis, it comes across as both funny and weirdly transgressive — especially since Sslthsss is holding his arms so he can’t escape. Over the following two-page hand-job, Conlon and Manning use a range of hysterically intricate motion lines to show her finger motions, while all the time she natters on like a typical scheming villainess.

The last panel of the sequence, in which we are looking down at Ravanna from Raika’s viewpoint as she looks up at him — is a blend of dominant and submissive fantasies bound up with genre clichés into one supremely sexy package.

In Michael Manning’s Spidergarden series, moments like this are woven together in a seamless whole, creating a world in which gender, sexuality, and identity flow and break down in a humid orgy of paranoia and soap-opera romance. Tranceptor hasn’t yet quite reached those heights, though their are hints that it might. Most promising is the series obsessive doubling. The second issue is split between the scenes with the Tranceptor (so bright they almost seem washed out) and those with Ravanna (very dark, with half-toned greys against solid black backgrounds and the shadowy Sslthsss lurking in the background.) The dark/light binary is mirrored and extended by others; there are two identical horse girls, two identical horse boys, two Tranceptors, two young men taken from the station (Raika by Ravanna, Hyu by the Tranceptor.) Where all this is leading isn’t exactly clear at this point in the series. But good vs. evil and blatantly contrasting nemeses are tried and true genre devices — and a genre device is, really, just another name for a particular cathexes of possibility and desire. In this sense, porn isn’t just a genre: it’s the genre. No wonder Conlon and Manning are able to make such perfect pulp out of it.